Threat 4

Heard this quote today. She's right. Some call it liberation or progress. It is not. She sees clearly when she calls it decadence.

The fourth threat to the West is very closely linked to educational failure: it is the systematic attack on the traditional family.

Of course, the family has also been attacked in unsystematic ways. In both our countries, and under parties of both left and right, the effectively unconditional supply of social benefits to those who were thought incapable of coping undermined the incentive to work and provided an alternative and seemingly endless income from government. It thus undercut the family unit. It promoted habits of idleness and delinquency. It permitted single-parenthood to become a financially sustainable, alternative way of life. By undermining the self-respect of so many of the most vulnerable members of society–the respectable poor struggling for decency against the odds–the dependency culture poisoned and weakened society as a whole.

Then on top of all that there has been a full-scale and deliberate assault on the institution of the family itself. The exaltation of violent and explicit sex increasingly coarsens the content of films and books and–eventually and inevitably–life itself. This is not progress. It is not liberation. It is decadence. We conservatives are not, most of us, saints: but even as sinners, we have a duty to fight–as whole-heartedly as our enemies promote–the attack on the family that threatens the West at its foundations.

Margaret Thatcher, Speech to the First International Conservative Congress, 1997

Of course it's deliberate. Of course it's on a grand scale. And, of course, we can see it plainly if we honestly look at the sifting of the family unit in these past decades. Some families have weathered it, because it has been a storm. Others have been dashed on the rocks and have either given up, disillusioned, or are attempting to salvage the pieces.

The threat upon the family is real and foundational. We do our best to grow our families in enemy territory. May God help us. May we heed His plan for families.